White's talk can be easily summarized: Mobile First.The internet is moving to mobile, the intranet is as well.

White has been researching this topic and has interesting (upcoming) reports about this topic. The number of users with mobile web access is astounding (refer to picture).

White also doesn't not believe in a future for mobile apps. He says develop for the mobile web, not apps. It's way too expensive to develop apps for all the different platforms.

The real value of mobile intranet will be in the area of business intelligence, says White. Mobile intranet supports the real-time enterprise. IT needs to address this trend. Also with respect to security (lots of devices are left behind/lost).

During the Social Business Summit we were also taken into the wonderful world of Jazz. Michael Gold of JazzImpact told us about creativity, innovation, leading and supporting in jazz. Here are some quotes from his talk. Of course he also showed us what he meant by playing wonderful pieces of jazz and getting us on our feet, out of our comfort zone...Here are some quotes:Lead and support are the two core roles in organizations and Jazz bands. The Liminal Zone: threshold between what we know and don't know. Jazz constantly moves back and forth over that boundary. Business should as well. Elements of a good Jazz ensemble are: A utonomy P assion R isk I nnovation L istening (listening is key) UPDATE April 6, 2011 Added pictures, updated links and corrected text.

This talk by Lee Bryant is about data and how it can lead to and improve social business intelligence. The industrial age model is getting less and less productive. It's still being masked by financials. We also see the limits of the carrot and stick management methods and extrinsic motivation as a way of orchestrating work. Process is an embedded responsive to prior stupidity (Shirky). It's the opposite of human endeavor which is about pattern matching, sense making, etc. Social Business is becoming the new mainstream. You can see this happening on the streets (shops saying "follow us on Twitter"). Data should/can drive evolutionary improvement. Social business data and intelligence can create the conditions for businesses to evolve. API's are the sex organs of business evolution then data is the DNA. Companies are sitting on loads of data. Of which just a small bit should remain confidential. This is the starting point for social CRM. Eventually it will be just the o…

Dion Hinchcliffe's presentation starts with the drivers for next-generation business: pervasive global connectivitynew frictionless interactionnext-generation mobilityfocus on network effectsinformation superabundanceinherent transparency, openness and broadcastthe rise of social capitalThe current customer engagement landscape consists of traditional and digital (internet) channels. We tend to approach these two in the same way. Channel fragmentation is now the norm (networks and devices). Customers have moved and companies have fallen behind. And this will get worse. The most important channels where your social business takes place are: MobileSocial networksSearch (the rest of the web)Dion went on to give a list of results social business can give: Radical reduction of costs (he mentioned 30% cost decrease in support costs)Customer satisfaction increasesReal-time response to customer needsMore profitable in general (relates to McKinsey 2010 study)So where did social business come fr…

What is social business? What does it look like? Dave Gray shares his view in napkin sketches.

Life expectancy of a S&P 500 company is getting shorter. It's 15 years now.

Companies are complex systems (shown by complex hierarchies). There are companies that make sense of other companies because they are so complex. Think Microsoft and government.

For every extra employee your profit goes down. For every 3 employees your profit per employee goes down. It is increasing, but by less and less. Or: diminishing returns.

However productivity goes up in cities when population grows. Why?

We think about companies as machines (stable, little relation to environment), but should start to think about them as organisms. That adapt to the environment.

Companies are made out of people. But they don't live long and can be less productive the larger they get.Dave refers to Arie de Geus' book The Living Company. His findings are long-living companies are:decentralized. Porous boudaries, eccen…

Share to Connect is about aligning our organization, Nokia, and the way we work with what we promise as a brand, says Ming Kwan. Their objective was to maximize the brand's productivity by turning it into a conversational brand. Transparency, listening and coordination will enable the organization to gain momentum in an era of exchange.Share to Connect consists of 3 main elements:organizational optimizationworkforce collaborationcustomer participationThe main issue they are trying to deal with is information overload. They collect lots and lots of information. Their big issue is generating insights from all the information.

So they have this idea/pilot called Socializer. An aggregation and analysis platform connecting the streams from the (social) internet to the organization.Socializer is a social action framework (with semantic analysis), it's internal and external, it's focused on actionable insights, it's real-time and employees can claim actions.

Charles Hull leads the company Archrival. They connect brands to youth culture. And study how young adults think, process and consume.

His talk is about millennials. Some numbers:Gen X: 40 milion in USGen Y: 70 million in US

Millennial themes:life tracking: millennials leverage technology to collect, categorize and diagram personal stats to better understand themselves. E.g. patientslikeme.com, mint.com. mon.thly.info.Middle class of fame: the 15 minutes of fame ideology has gone from an aspiration to an expectation.Digidentity: Youth use their social channels to establish their identities and demonstrate their social currency.Tech-eyed view: Millenials see the world through a social media lens making every moment sharable.Just to show how different millennials are, take a look at what they answered to the following question.What would you rather give up? Give up internet or sex? 33% would rather give up sex than the internet...

What's a Jam? An online forum on which people can post ideas, discuss them, etc. They learned that what happens on the backend is essential for the success of the jam. It makes the results richer.Jams leverage the collective wisdom of the organization.They have real-time metrics running in the background, visualized to see who's participating, what are the themes, etc.

What happens after the jam? Sometimes it's easy. With the Jam about values the values were the result. But sometimes it's more complex.

Elements of the Jam are:vision, strategy, purposeJam!Analysis (e.g. understand why people comment)Champions & Leaders workshop (about 100 employees, face to face networking related to themes)Work streams to turn ideas into actionThe most important thing after a Jam is to continue the conversation out in the open. (They did this wrong i…

Next talk (no slides!) by John Hagel about Cascading Change: Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things into Motion.

We are moving to a world of increasing returns. This world is very different from the world we were in, the world of decreasing returns.
This movement can be typified by moving from business as stock to flows. Stocks was about: build up knowledge, protect it aggressively and capitalize on it. But in a world of excelerating change, these knowledge stocks rapidly diminish in value. (Except for companies like Coca Cola.) New opportunities are in the area of knowledge flows. And this is where social tools come into place. Not only used insides companies but also over institutions. There are even more values between institutions than inside them.

Some say we should move fast here. But Hagel's approach is: move slowly so they trigger cascades and are sustainable over time.
Social software adoption approaches:bottom-up, starting in teamsdeploy it in a section of the bus…

JP Rangaswami takes the stage with the first talk titled: Nature doesn't do SLAs.It's a shame that we live in a world in which we need a term as social business. It's tautological. We are rediscovering something we lost.The Cluetrain Manifesto helped him see this again. We lost something and need to refind it.His talk was built around three concepts: change, context and conflict.

ChangeWork is changing: "Historical businesses were hierarchies of products and customers." We have been overlaying the industrial age model on knowledge workers. We did the same for healthcare and education, he remarks. And we now see this doesn't work and is generating problems. Knowledge work is not linear, not repeatable, not a process. Knowledge work is lumpy. And the good thing is the tools are changing rapidly as well.Change is a constant. He illustrates this with the touch innovation. And voice, talking to a…

Search has been a hot topic in the intranet space for a long time. Why can’t I find what I’m looking for inside the company, just like with Google on the Internet. Martin White’s breakout at the Intranet Conference (Congres Intranet) was about this topic and want to help us improve intranet search.

White started out by asking which search engine we used. A long list of search platforms is mentioned, ranging from open source search technology to Sharepoint search. Not many participants have the same engine.This illustrates one of the points White wanted to make. Search isn’t easy. It not easy on the internet, and it’s hard on the intranet as well. He shows how different the search results are. This is not helpful for users and it makes search unnessissararily complex. This is one of the reasons user go for the easiest route on the internet: just use Google.

However inside companies one often cannot easily choose this route . On the internet you mostly know what you are looking for. It’s…

Jane McConnell was just as surprised as many in the audience. The number of participants in the breakout about governance was huge! Jane’s breakout continued on the theme of her keynote: how do we govern the intranet in the social era? What are governance principles and models? Her post about the breakout can be found here.

As Jane said in her keynote, a holistic approach to intranet governance is essential. As is its embeddedness in the organization. This breakout explained more deeply what she meant with this means.
Governance in general is very complex. There are 3 reasons why this is so:

Different groups make conflicting decisionsThe right people are not looped in from the beginning when decisions are madeDecisions that are made have no relatedness with reality and are theoreticJane proposes a holistic approach to governance through 1. organization and 2. 'technology'. Governance relates to ownership of the intranet platform, the principles of the intranet and not its conte…

Jane's central statement was: Lead, don't manage your new intranet!
But she started out by asking the audience to raise their hands when asked who owned the intranet. HR is clearly the missing player in the intranet. Hardly any of the audience could say HR is the owner or one of the owners of the intranet. In most cases (76%) Communications is the owner (with IT in second place). But a surprisingly large number could says the have a holistic team (10%). Meaning the intranet is owner by at least Business, IT and Comms.
But these departments are losing control due to social tool deployment.

How boring most people think governance is, it is the key to a successful intranet and also to successful change of the intranet. Governance does not imply control, but leadership. Without governance yo…

What is the future of intranet technology? Looking at the cheap social tools, what should intranet teams invest in? And what does mobile mean for the intranet? These were just some of the questions Tony Byrne addressed in his keynote at the Intranet Conference (Congres Intranet).

Byrne advised the audience to focus on a light-weight application architecture for the intranet. Lots will change in the coming years and is changing. Making the architecture lighter will give room to respond to new technology, changing business and user needs. One central intranet platform is not (going to be) enough. Make sure the elements and functionality of the intranet can be clicked together and mixed. Organize for mashups.
Another theme in Byrne’s talk is the social layer. We should add a social layer to the intranet. Make the technology more human through social. Integrate the elements of social everywhere in your intranet, like tagging, commenting, social networking, location, etc.

Dion's work rotates around what the implications of the new web are for the workplace, for business. How is the internet and social media impacting the way we do business and organize businesses? For some time this field was called 'enterprise 2.0', but Dion says, it's called 'social business' now. (A large part of the insights Dion gets, come from the 2.0 Adoption Council, by the way.)

The audience is challenged to rethink the intranet as a social workplace.

What are the drivers for next-generation business, according to Hinchcliffe:pervasive global connectivityfrictionless interactive platformsnetwork effects70% of the content on the internet is generated by social tools. The usage of social networking tools has overtaken email usage on the internet. Not many…

You may have noticed the Intranet Conference 2011 (Dutch: Congres Intranet) was held this week. Last year I was able to live-blog the conference and get the posts out right away. Now that I'm working for the company organizing the conference this wasn't possible. Tweeting during the conference wasn't a problem, but publishing blogposts was just a bit too much work. But I'll post my notes on the keynotes and breakouts in the coming days!

The posts will be about:
- the keynotes by Dion Hinchcliffe about social business and intranet, Jane McConnell about governance in the 'social' world, Tony Byrne about the future of intranet technologies and Martin White about mobile and intranet
- the two breakouts I joined by Jane McConnell and Martin White

Looked at LinkedIn Skills. Interesting extension to Linkedin. Although it isn't really new functionality. All users could already fill in the expertise they (think they) have based on their work experience. To me this is one of the limitations of LinkedIn. Isn't it much more interesting to hear what others think of you? What expertise do they think you have? Who is the go-to person when you need someone with skill x? LinkedIn Skills basically only says: I think I'm the person you're looking for.

Something great to read for the weekend (- you'll need some time to read it -) if you're interested in the web and what the effect of the web is on the way we live and think. This great pieces triggered me because I ran into an interview about a new book, 'The Information'. I thought this article was also about it, but it is and it isn't. This article is about the thesis that the internet is changing the way we think and our brain itself. Or isn't it? Well, find out by reading the article. Highly recommended! Great food-for-thought and input for lengthy discussion.Thoughts are bigger than the things that deliver them. Our contraptions may shape our consciousness, but it is our consciousness that makes our credos, and we mostly live by those.

Maybe I shouldn't depend on email as much as I do, like Luis Suarez is telling us. But there's something about email that surprises me. When I send emails to people, ending with a clear question and deadline, many don't reply at all. Why is this? A week or a month later I have to get back to them and ask them again (yes, I keep track of the emails I need to get a reply on). Then they usually send a reply back right away... So it is possible to get a reply back quickly.
I know people are busy. I am too. And I don't assume everyone will be waiting for my email and send back a reply in less than a day. I don't mind if I have to wait. As long as you know the reply/answer will come around sooner or later. Walking up to the person or calling him/her helps of course, if possible.

So, how do I handle email? I basically apply the Getting Things Done rules: if I can answer within 2 minutes, I reply right away. Most email fits in this category... If it takes longer I plan it …

This post should have been posted a long time ago... Being part of a big companywas great. One of the great things it brought me was being a member of the 2.0 Adoption Council. The 2.0 Adoption Council is a group of Enterprise 2.0 practitioners working for large companies. I was a member of the Council for a couple of years. It was a great source of inspiration for my work. Lots of smart people are in the Council. Actually I was humbled to be part of a group of enterprise 2.0 practitioners that are seen as the leaders in this space. Some had many more years experience than I did. You wonder what they get from the Council? Well, that's one of the great things about these communities: we're all in it to learn and help each other. And that's exactly what happened. Even though some have been in this space for a long time, we're all still just getting started. To cultivate interaction we used Jive, Yammer and Socialcast. And email of course. Even more important were the meetup…